I wanted to share a new essay, “#Trendingistrending: When Algorithms Become Culture” that I’ve just completed for a forthcoming Routledge anthology called Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies, edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge. My aim is to focus on the various “trending algorithms” that populate social media platforms, consider what they do as a set, and then […]
I’m excited to announce the publication of a special issue of Digital Journalism that I guest-edited around the theme “Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts, and Critiques.” I was fortunate to work with a terrific set of contributors. Their work sheds important light on the implications of data and algorithms, computation and quantification, for journalism as practice and […]
My brothers and sisters in data science, computational social science, and all of us studying and building the Internet of things inside or outside corporate firewalls, to improve a product, explore a scientific question, or both: we are now, officially, doing human subjects research. I’m frustrated that the state of public intellectualism allows us, individually, […]
Many of us who study new media, whether we do so experimentally or qualitatively, our data big or small, are tracking the unfolding debate about the Facebook “emotional contagion” study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. The research, by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock, argued that small shifts in the emotions […]
“What we are really concerned with when we invoke the “algorithmic” here is not the algorithm per se but the insertion of procedure into human knowledge and social experience. What makes something algorithmic is that it is produced by or related to an information system that is committed (functionally and ideologically) to the computational generation […]